


endless day without a sunset provision

by Anonymous



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Apocalypse, Pre-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-15 17:43:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18078032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: You would give up your right arm to go backto when you had a right arm





	endless day without a sunset provision

**Author's Note:**

> Title and inspiration from They Might Be Giants' "Push Back the Hands."

"Dolores," Five says, when the invaders who made it past the gates are all lying on the ground, dead or nearly so, "what have they done to you?"

It's fine, Dolores says. Her gaze, however, is averted from her right arm, which now ends at the wrist. I can handle it.

Five doesn't want to tell her that he grew up with a bunch of guys who, when hurt, would say they were all right, they could handle it, and they were all lying. She's had to become a fighter in the worst of circumstances and he's not going to be overbearing about his training, his preparation, his experience, not when she's been badly injured.

"I'm going to move these away from the camp," he says, once he gets an extra chain and extra lock for the gates. They have a lot of extras, in their compound. "Shout out if anyone else approaches."

She's silent, sulking. She knows how to keep a watch, Five can almost hear her say.

He grabs the closest intruder, or what's left of him, and jumps out. They have to do that, with corpses. Scavengers will try to come in for the bodies if they don't. And the coyotes will not only scramble over the walls to eat anything, anywhere, they'll also piss all over the compound to say they were there.

The first time they got attacked, Five was sixteen, not too far into this apocalyptic wasteland. He felt kind of bad about killing them, when there were so few people left after the world ended, but then he tried to talk to the lone survivor and discovered he was a complete psycho who believed the end of the world was a fine time to wage a race war and rape twelve-year-old girls, so Five hamstrung him and shoved a knife through one of his eyes, then the other, and left him for whatever was willing to eat him.

Of course, none of that group threatened Dolores. If they laid one finger on Dolores, there wouldn't be enough of anyone left to talk to.

Shifting the bodies is heavy work. Five's not--Five hasn't kept the best track of time, he thinks he's in his late twenties, but his back hurts by the time he's schlepped them downwind from the camp. He sweats, and the sweat soaks into his beard, and he scratches it--and then he looks at his hand, really looks at it. The nails, the callouses, the burn scar. He feels a little guilty in that moment, scratching his beard with his hand when back at camp Dolores can't. Her hand is gone. Five thinks he might find it in the body parts he's hauling out, but it's gone. 

The corpses in front of the gate, the ones he made when they were trying to cut through the chain, he leaves for the scavengers as they are, and to let anyone else know what'll happen to them if they don't keep moving.

Inside the compound, he cleans up the worst of the stains. The sun's starting to go down by then and the empty night sky stares down on them. Dolores is quiet, melancholy. Five suggests they have dessert, treat themselves. Most of the processed and canned foods from before the apocalypse have gone bad by now, but there are some that don't spoil. They share a package of strawberry pop-tarts after a simple meal of baked potatoes and boiled weeds. Dolores gets frosting on her upper lip, goes to wipe it off with her hand. Her right hand.

Five says, "Let me get that for you."

She does. Not entirely graciously.

"I'll look for a prosthesis for you--there's that old strip mall nearby. I know it won't be your hand, but it'll be _a_ hand."

Dolores is still looking wistfully at the stump. 

"The things they did with modern medical technology--well, it wasn't great. But it wasn't all that bad."

Dolores shrugs, she guesses. She's uncharacteristically quiet as they're going to sleep. Five is the little spoon as usual, but tonight she's got her right arm over his shoulder and the lack of a hand is literally in his face.

"You know," says Five, "my brother once almost lost a hand?"

I didn't even know you had a brother, says Dolores.

She's not being sarcastic. (She sometimes--okay, often--is.) They usually talk about the day, the week, the month they've had. He does, anyway. She's the one who talks about her life before the apocalypse. It sounds like it was glamorous. His might too, if he ever talked about it. But now that he thinks about it, he's pretty sure he hasn't.

"I have four," he says. "And two sisters. Have I never--have I never talked about my family?"

You once told me your father was an utter bastard.

"Well, he was." Never, Five marvels to himself. He guesses that changes now. "Anyway, Klaus, my brother, almost lost a hand when we were twelve. My other brother Ben summoned up these monsters--yeah, I'm going to have to give you lots of context later--that were kind of like a cross between spiders and alligators, but without any eyes."

Dolores thinks that's enough detail, considering they are going to sleep soon.

She's had a hard enough day, Five agrees, and he doesn't need to give her more nightmares. But he has to clarify, "Also no teeth." That made it less scary for him at the time. "Just this bony ridge where teeth would have been. Anyway, one of them gets its jaws around Klaus's left hand, and Ben manages to banish them, although he wasn't sure if Klaus's hand would go back with them to their dimension or not. It didn't, but the ridges had cut off the circulation to Klaus's hand and it was all swollen and purple and for a few days it was kind of touch and go." Vanya brought him bowl after bowl of ice. Klaus sent her off for other things too, made her cut his food, read to him, all that stuff. Five was on the verge of strangling him. The rest of them were too, because Klaus veered between melodramatics and increasingly awful jokes about his incipient handlessness. And then one morning Dad announced Klaus could resume training. Apparently almost everyone was so distracted by his behavior that they didn't notice the hand shrinking, paling, returning to normal. Klaus tried to get out of it by smearing a whole palette of Allison's eyeshadow on his hand, but it didn't fool Dad. Or maybe Dad just didn't care. "In the end, he didn't lose it, but it was the first time any of us had a real, serious injury, and it left an impression on us. Especially Dad."

Five doesn't wonder what happened to his family--he's been by the old house. But he wonders what went on in the seventeen years he was gone. Some days he aches from not knowing. Some days he's glad he doesn't. Knowing might make him miss them more.

You weren't kidding about how much context I'm going to need, Dolores says. And then, I'm glad he didn't lose the hand. Your brother. And I'm glad you told me about him.

"Yeah," says Five. "Me too."

Why didn't you ever tell me about your family before? she wants to know.

He kisses the stump of her arm, and wishes he had a better answer than, "I don't know. It's not that you don't deserve to know about that part of my life, I just--couldn't."

Dolores says she understands, that the subject must be painful for him. And it is: thinking about them, their bodies in the rubble, their house fallen down, Five suddenly feels like he's the one who's missing a limb.


End file.
